Dick Cheney and His Impact on American Military Involvement

Richard Bruce Cheney, forty-sixth Vice President and briefly acting President of the United States of America, died on the third of November this year. A complicated man, described rather reservedly by the Associated Press as “polarising,” he leaves behind a complicated legacy, especially regarding his long history of foreign military involvement, which is seen by some as warmongering and by others as a stabilising force on the global stage. Dick Cheney is, primarily by those on the right, viewed as a conservative hero who stabilised nations and continually fought against what they see as the federal government’s encroachment on states’ rights. By others, he is viewed as a sly warmonger who wielded power from behind both Bushes and destabilised foreign nations. 

Contrary to his later stances, he deferred the draft for the Vietnam War five times until he became ineligible due to his marital status. On October 6, 1965, the draft expanded to include married men without children. The Cheneys had their first child, Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney, nine months and two days later. Cheney applied for a 3-A draft exemption reserved for men with children and never joined the military. 

George W. Bush eulogising at Cheney's funeral. (Photo Credit: ABCNews)

Dick Cheney was by no means the first American to interfere in other nations' concerns from inside the White House. America has been embroiled in conflicts, shows of force, or other military operations for about 93% of the nation's history (as of the last count in 2018). George Washington, the country’s first President, said in his farewell address that the country should remain neutral in all cases and that temporary alliances were only justified in

“extraordinary emergencies.” The nation seems to have heeded this warning and stayed clear of foreign affairs for the first half of its history, or at least until the beginning of the twentieth century. 

America waged wars of territorial expansion, yes, but on the whole did not engage in trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific warfare until the early twentieth century. After that, beginning with the Great White Fleet’s debut on the world stage, the United States was drawn into further conflicts. These conflicts, from the World Wars to the Cold War, were primarily ideological. Only five wars have been declared by the United States Congress, meaning that by official tally, this rule holds true. Of the wars declared by Congress, three (the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War) were before 1900, and two (World War I and World War II) came after. 

This is not a universal rule, of course. The second conflict the United States ever had with another nation occurred three years before the American Constitution was even written. This conflict, which demonstrates how loosely the term ‘war’ is used in the 93% statistic referenced previously, was the capture of an American commerce ship by the Sultan of Morocco in an effort to get the attention of the American government, which had until then ignored the Sultan’s requests for a treaty. This treaty, the Treaty of Marrakesh, is the longest-held peace treaty involving the United States. Nor is this to say that the United States stopped waging wars on its home continent. For example, the Banana Wars, which were a series of conflicts and three occupations of foreign territory, were fought in the background of these events from 1912 to 1934. 

In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt ordered a voyage of sixteen warships to circumnavigate the globe. These warships were painted white and paraded as the Great White Fleet. This voyage, visiting friendly ports and ports with strained U.S. relationships, was the first great show of power demonstrated by the United States military. Other global engagements soon followed, most notably the World Wars. The causes of the World Wars and the Cold War conflict that soon followed are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that these three conflicts had echoing impacts and contained many smaller conflicts. The Vietnam War, for example, was a full-fledged conflict involving the United States military, but it is still considered as being under the wider umbrella of the Cold War. Almost all of the conflicts that the United States engaged in between 1945 and 1990 were directly related to or a part of the Cold War. 

Dick Cheney’s Operation Just Cause marks a significant departure from this dogma. It was “the first American use of force since 1945 that was unrelated to the Cold War.” In fact, the de facto president of Panama, Manuel Noriega, was employed by the CIA for over a decade as an informant against the socialist Cuban and Sandinista governments. Dick Cheney was seen as instrumental to this military operation, which legitimised the involvement of the United States in foreign affairs unrelated to the recently won Cold War.

Dick Cheney speaking with troops in Iraq. (Photo Credit: CNN)

Less than a year after the invasion of Panama, the United States helped build up military forces in Kuwait and then led a liberating campaign to take back the land invaded by Iraq. The Gulf War, as it was later termed, is widely seen as one of the most successful post–Cold War conflicts involving the United States. The second phase of the conflict, termed Operation Desert Storm, was completed in three days. Rather than stay in the Middle East and capture Baghdad, the U.S. government decided to cut its losses and accept the peace made in the region.    

When Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, Dick Cheney moved to the private sector, eventually becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. This company picked a former cabinet secretary to be “a door opener and new business generator.”

George H. W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, won the 2000 election, and Dick Cheney was picked to fill the position of Vice President. As Vice President, Cheney made many claims that Iraq held Weapons of Mass Destruction and that the Iraqi government had ties to Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation that perpetrated the September Eleventh attacks in the United States. Based on these justifications, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. There was no such stockpile of WMDs, a fact that President Bush and Vice President Cheney knew. In fact, the CIA and UN reported before the war that it was extremely unlikely that Iraq had WMDs. Cheney publicly pushed back on these reports, criticising the agencies. Twenty years later, Bush joked that the invasion was “wholly unjustified” and “brutal.” 

          Dick Cheney as the Deputy White House Chief (Photo Credit: The Arizona Star)

The Iraq War lasted eight years. The War in Afghanistan lasted twenty years. Dick Cheney played a large hand in legitimising the involvement of the United States in foreign affairs after the Cold War. The two quick, easy wars he helped wage as Secretary of Defence provided the ground for later proponents of American intervention to stand on, including the War in Iraq he helped wage as Vice President. Dick Cheney is certainly not the first American to wage wars for non-ideological reasons; Roosevelt demonstrated that the United States’ power often lies in foreign entanglements. But Cheney certainly paved the way in the post–Cold War world for more entanglements thousands of miles away from home. In many ways, the debates that continue today about America’s role in the world can be traced back to the precedents he helped set, making his legacy both enduring and deeply complex.

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